On October 3, 2026, Moderna Museet on Skeppsholmen opens the exhibition "Tehran/New York" on floor 4: around a hundred works by Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922–2019), from mirror mosaics that shatter the room into a thousand fragments to pencil drawings of flowers and the autobiographical boxes she called "Heartache Boxes." This is the first time she has had a major solo exhibition in Sweden, and it runs until February 28, 2027. For anyone considering a geometric poster for the wall, it’s an unusually good reason to take a closer look at what geometry can actually do in a room: Monir’s hexagons, triangles, and mirror shards are a two-hundred-year-old craft reinterpreted by a woman who moved between the bazaars of Tehran and the avant-garde of New York.
One hundred works, two cities, and a mirror mosaic that makes the viewer part of the work
The exhibition was initiated by Moderna Museet, with Asrin Haidari as curator, and is presented in collaboration with Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and Kunstmuseum Den Haag. After Stockholm, it will continue on to other cities in Europe, but it begins here. The works span 1970 to 2015 and show the full range: kaleidoscopic mirror reliefs, sculptural assemblages, collages, calligraphy, carpets, and the flower drawings that run like a quiet thread through her entire body of work.
One of the key works is "Third Family" from 2011, a series in which Monir takes the hexagon and other basic forms from the tradition of Islamic art and puts them through variation after variation. She often worked this way, in series she called "families," where the works are connected by similarities in form and structure rather than by subject matter. It’s a way of thinking that is close to how you put together a gallery wall: not identical pictures, but pictures that share a visual language.
What makes her mirror works special is that they refuse to stand still. As you walk past a mirror mosaic, your own image breaks into hundreds of fragments, the room’s colors drift across the surface, and the work changes with every step. Monir put it herself: “You become part of the art, and the art becomes part of you.” The boundary between work, room, and viewer dissolves, and this quality has made her one of Iran’s most influential artists and a touchstone for contemporary art far beyond the country’s borders.
Quick facts: "Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian – Tehran/New York" is on display at Moderna Museet in Stockholm from 3 October 2026 to 28 February 2027, on floor 4. Approximately 100 works from 1970–2015. Curator: Asrin Haidari. Curator-led tour on 3 October at 13:00, followed by guided tours in Swedish, including on 13, 16, 17 and 20 October. Standard admission 170 SEK, free admission for under-18s and on Free Friday, Fridays from 18:00 to 20:00 until 18 December 2026.
From Qazvin to Bonwit Teller: an illustrator who met Warhol and found her way home in Shiraz
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian was born in Qazvin in 1922 and studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran before travelling to New York in 1945. There, she did not immediately become an artist in the gallery sense, but an illustrator and designer. She drew for the Bonwit Teller department store and the fashion magazine Glamour, and co-founded the textile company Katja & Monir, which later became Katja of Sweden. So a Swedish thread runs through her biography long before Moderna Museet entered the picture.
In New York, she moved in the same circles as Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson and Barnett Newman, and later Andy Warhol. According to the Guggenheim’s 2015 catalogue, the years 1945–1957 shaped her eye for geometric abstraction, the rhythm and scale of postwar American art. But it was in Iran that she found her material.
When she returned to Tehran in 1957, the city was entering two decades of rapid cultural development. Monir exhibited at the first Tehran Biennial, represented Iran at the Venice Biennale and, at the same time, began collecting: Islamic art, folk art, crafts, paintings on glass. The turning point came in 1966, during a visit to the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz. There, walls, arches and domes are covered in ayeneh-kari, a centuries-old Iranian technique in which small pieces of mirror are assembled into geometric patterns. The technique flourished under the Safavids, when imported Venetian mirrors gave artisans new material, and became an integral part of palaces and shrines under the Qajars. Monir lifted mirror mosaic out of architecture and into reliefs and freestanding art objects.
Then came the 1979 revolution. Her home, her studio, her works and most of the collection were confiscated and dispersed. She lived in exile in New York for twenty-five years and slowly built a new artistic practice on a small scale, using paper, pencil, photographs and reproductions. In the collages from her years in exile, loss and longing are woven together with fragments from Iranian art history and images of her own lost works. Memory became a material among others. Only in 2004, at the age of 82, did she return to Tehran, reopen her studio and begin working with mirror mosaics alongside specialized artisans. This became the most productive period of her career: the works grew in scale and complexity.
Recognition came late, but in a big way. "Infinite Possibility: Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014" opened at Serralves in Porto in 2014 and was shown at the Guggenheim in New York in 2015 as the first American museum exhibition of her mirror works. In 2017, the Monir Museum opened in Tehran, the first museum in Iran dedicated to a single female artist. She died in Tehran in 2019, aged 96. In Sweden, her work was first shown in 2016 in the group exhibition "New Visions" at Tensta Konsthall. More about the works can be found at Moderna Museet and in the Guggenheim exhibition archive.
"Monir took a craft that had been confined to domes and palace walls for five hundred years and hung it on a wall at eye level. That is exactly what a geometric poster does, too: it moves the pattern from architecture to you."
The hexagon, the mirror and the flower: what Monir’s three visual languages can teach us about geometry on the wall
There are three things in Monir’s art that are directly useful to anyone choosing posters, and they correspond to three parts of her work.
The first is the hexagon. The geometry of Islamic art is based on a basic shape being repeated, mirrored and rotated until an infinite field emerges, without a center and without an edge. Monir took that principle and let it remain in a single object, a hexagon that opens out into more. For a wall, this means that a strictly geometric motif need not feel cold or technical. It can carry the same calm as the tiled floor of an old mosque, an order the eye can rest in. Graphic posters with repeated shapes work in just this way: they create rhythm instead of demanding attention.
The second is the mirror, and what it does to color. In the 1976 work “Untitled,” triangles and a grid pattern meet in blue, orange, and green, colors that are multiplied by the room’s light in her mirror works. A poster cannot reflect, but it can use the same principle: a few strong colors in strict geometry appear more intense than a busy design because the eye reads them as a system. That’s why abstract posters in three or four clear colors often look more premium than designs with twenty shades.
The third is the flower. Throughout her life, Monir drew flowers, often in pencil or ink, and they are displayed in Stockholm alongside the mirror works. The contrast is the point: the soft, growing, and incomplete beside the hard, repeated, and precise. It’s a combination that works just as well on a wall at home. A strictly geometric poster next to a botanical poster featuring a single branch gives each something to push against, and the wall no longer feels like either a laboratory or a greenhouse.
There’s also a connection to the times. In fall 2026, Neo Deco dominates interiors, with dark woods, chrome, glass, and geometric shapes, and Monir’s mirrors and hexagons are visually close to that aesthetic without being a copy of the 1920s. “Tehran/New York” offers a historical explanation of why glass, geometry, and light belong together. Continue reading our guide to Kandinsky and the birth of abstract art to see what the European abstraction Monir encountered in New York looked like.
How to bring Monir’s geometry into your home: designs, colors, sizes, and rooms
Monir’s own works are not available to buy as posters, and that’s not the point. The point is to use her principles when choosing from designs that already exist.
The hallway and stairwell: one large geometric poster
Mirror mosaics are designed to be encountered in motion, and the hallway is a space you move through. A large geometric poster in 50x70 or 70x100 cm, placed where you can see it as you enter, creates the same sense of the room opening up. Choose a design with clear repetition and no more than three colors. A metal frame in black or brass reinforces the feeling that the design is an object, not just a print.
The living room: a family of three
Do as Monir did and think in families. Hang three posters in the same format, 30x40 or 40x50 cm, with the same color palette but different geometric designs, in a row with 5–7 cm between them. The series reads as a single work, just like "Third Family". Keep the frames identical; the variation should be in the designs, not the framing.
The bedroom: light-toned geometry, with a flower beside it
Here, Monir’s drawings point the way. Choose a geometric poster in sand, light gray, or muted blue and pair it with a botanical design in the same format. Avoid high-gloss frames and orange or red; what works at Skeppsholmen under museum lighting will feel too intense by the bed.
The kitchen and dining area: bold color in a small format
The blue, orange, and green in "Untitled" (1976) make for a palette that can hold its own against cooking smells and evening light. Two 21x30 cm posters with bold geometric color fields, hung above a bench or by the dining table, give the kitchen some of the same glow as Monir’s mirrors without taking up storage space. Among our color-pop posters, you’ll find designs where color takes center stage.
Tip: Try the “Monir principle” before you buy. Put the designs you’re considering side by side on your screen and ask yourself whether they share at least two qualities, such as color palette and style, or format and line weight. If they share fewer than two, they’ll look like a collection of individual images. If they share two or more, they’ll form a family, and that’s what makes a wall feel considered.
If you want to understand why geometric and abstract art feels so personal even though it doesn’t depict anything, we recommend our article on the viewer’s share and the research on abstract art. And if you’d like to see how another artist built an entire life’s work around a single geometric shape, read our piece on Josef Albers and Homage to the Square.
Frequently asked questions about Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and the exhibition at Moderna Museet
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian spent twenty-five years in exile waiting to make her large mirror works, and when she finally could, she was over eighty. The exhibition at Moderna Museet is an opportunity to see what patience and a single geometric idea can become. Take her three principles home with you: repetition, clear color, and a flower alongside, and build a wall that feels cohesive. Among our minimalist posters and geometric designs, you'll find an assortment to get started with, and we always include the advice Monir herself lived by: let the artwork become part of the room, and the room part of the artwork.